MARBLE HALLS AND MARBLE WALLS
There was little of the spectacular in our work the next day as we
slowly and laboriously dragged an empty boat upstream against the
swift-running current, taking advantage of many little eddies, but
finding much of the shore swept clean. I had ample opportunity to
ponder on the wisdom of my attempt to save time by running the Soap
Creek Rapid instead of making a portage, while we carried our loads
over the immense boulders that banked the stream, down to a swift
piece of water, past which we could not well bring the boats; or while
we developed the wet plates from the ruined plate-holders. It was
with no little surprise that we found all the plates, except a few
which were not uniformly wet and developed unevenly, could be saved.
It took a day and a half to complete all this work.
Marble Canyon was now beginning to narrow up, with a steep,
boulder-covered slope on either side, three or four hundred feet
high; with a sheer wall of dark red limestone of equal height
directly above that. There was also a plateau of red sandstone and
distant walls topped with light-coloured rock, the same formations
with which we were familiar in the Grand Canyon. The inner gorge had
narrowed from a thousand feet or more down to four hundred feet, the
slope at the river was growing steeper and gradually disappearing,
and each mile of travel had added a hundred feet or more to the
height of the walls. Soon after resuming our journey that afternoon,
the slope disappeared altogether, and the sheer walls came down close
to the water. There were few places where one could climb out, had we
desired to do so. This hard limestone wall, which Major Powell had
named the marble wall, had a disconcerting way of weathering very
smooth and sheer, with a few ledges and fewer breaks.
We made a short run that day, going over a few rapids, stopping an
hour to make some pictures where an immense rock had fallen from the
cliff above into the middle of the river bed, leaving a forty-foot
channel on one side, and scarcely any on the other. Below this we
found a rapid so much like the Soap Creek Rapid in appearance that
a portage seemed advisable. It was evening when we got the _Edith_
to the lower end of this rapid after almost losing her, as we lined
her down, and she was wedged under a sloping rock that overhung the
rapid. We had two ropes, one at either end, attached to the boat in
this case. Emery stood below the rock ready to pull her in when once
past the rock. There was a sickening crackling of wood as the deck
of the boat wedged under and down to the level of the water, and at
Emery’s call I released the boat, throwing the rope into the river,
and hurried to help him. He was almost dragged into the water as the
boat swung around, fortunately striking against a sand-bank, instead
of the many rocks that lined the shore. We were working with a stream
different from the Green River, we found, and the _Defiance_ was
taken from the water the next day and slowly worked, one end at a
time, over the rocks, up to a level sand-bank, twenty-five or thirty
feet above the river. Then we put rollers under her, and worked her
down past the rapid. This work was little to our liking, for the
boats, now pretty well water-soaked, weighed considerably more than
their original five hundred pounds’ weight.
A few successful plunges soon brought back our former confidence, and
we continued to run all other rapids that presented themselves. This
afternoon we passed the first rapid we remembered having seen, where
we could not land at its head before running it. A slightly higher
stage of water, however, would have made many such rapids. Just below
this point we found the body of a bighorn mountain-sheep floating in
an eddy. It was impossible to tell just how he came to his death.
There was no sign of any great fall that we could see. He had a
splendid pair of horns, which we would have liked to have had at
home, but which we did not care to amputate and carry with us.
[Illustration: _Copyright by Kolb Bros._
“IT WAS TOO GOOD A CAMP TO MISS.”]
[Illustration: _Copyright by Kolb Bros._
ARCH IN MARBLE CANYON. NOTE FIGURE ON RIGHT.]
On this day’s travel, we passed a number of places where
the marble--which had suggested this canyon’s name to Major
Powell--appeared. The exposed parts were checked, or seamed, and
apparently would have little commercial value. We passed a shallow
cave or two this day, then found another cave or hole, running back
about fifteen feet in the wall, so suitable for a camp that we
could not refuse the temptation to stop, although we had made but a
very short run this day. The high water had entered it, depositing
successive layers of sand on the bottom, rising in steps, one above
the other, making convenient shelves for maps and journals, pots and
pans; while little shovelling was necessary to make the lower level
of sand fit our sleeping bags. A number of small springs, bubbling
from the walls near by, gave us the first clear water that we had
found for some time, and a pile of driftwood caught in the rocks,
directly in front of our cave, added to its desirability for a camp.
Firewood was beginning to be the first consideration in choosing
a camp, for in many places the high water had swept the shores
clean, and spots which might otherwise have made splendid camps were
rendered most undesirable for this reason.
So Camp Number 47 was made in this little cave, with a violent
rapid directly beneath us, making a din that might be anything but
reassuring, were we not pretty well accustomed to it by this time.
The next day, Sunday, November the 12th, was passed in the same spot.
The air turned decidedly cold this day, a hard wind swept up the
river, the sky above was overcast, and we had little doubt that snow
was falling on the Kaibab Plateau, which we could not see, but which
we knew rose to the height of 5500 feet above us, but a few miles to
the northwest of this camp. The sheer walls directly above the river
dropped down considerably at this point, and a break or two permitted
us to climb up as high as we cared to go on the red sandstone wall,
which had lost its level character, and now rose in a steep slope
over a thousand feet above us. These walls, with no growth but the
tussocks of bunch-grass, the prickly pear cactus, the mescal, and the
yucca, were more destitute of growth than any we had seen, excepting
the upper end of Desolation Canyon, even the upper walls lacking the
growth of piñon pine and juniper which we usually associated with
them. We were now directly below the Painted Desert, which lay to
the left of the canyon, and no doubt a similar desert was on the
right-hand side, in the form of a narrow plateau; but we had no means
of knowing just how wide or narrow this was, before it raised again
to the forest-covered Buckskin Mountains and the Kaibab Plateau.
The rapid below our camp was just as bad as its roar, we found,
on running it the next day. Most of the descent was confined to
a violent drop at the very beginning, but there was a lot of
complicated water in the big waves that followed. Emery was thrown
forward in his boat, when he reached the bottom of the chute,
striking his mouth, and bruising his hands, as he dropped his oars
and caught the bulkhead. An extra oar was wrenched from the boat
and disappeared in the white water, or foam that was as nearly
white as muddy water ever gets. I nearly upset, and broke the pin
of a rowlock, the released oar being jerked from my hand, sending
me scrambling for an extra oar, when the boat swept into a swift
whirlpool. Emery caught my oar as it whirled past him; the other was
found a half-mile below in an eddy.
Some of the rapids in the centre of Marble Canyon were not more than
75 feet wide, with a corresponding violence of water. The whirlpools
in the wider channels below these rapids were the strongest we had
seen, and had a most annoying way of holding the boats just when we
thought we had evaded them. Sometimes there would be a whirlpool on
either side, with a sharply defined line of division in the centre,
along which it was next to impossible to go without being caught
on one side or the other. These whirlpools were seldom regarded
as serious, for our boats were too wide and heavy to be readily
overturned in them, although we saved ourselves more than one upset
by throwing our weight to the opposite side. A small boat would have
upset. On two occasions we were caught in small whirlpools, where a
point of rock projected from the shore, turning upstream, splitting
a swift current and making a very rapid and difficult whirl, where
the boats were nearly smashed against the walls. Below all such
places were the familiar boils, or fountains, or shoots, as they are
variously termed. These are the lower end of the whirlpools, emerging
often from the quiet water below a rapid with nearly as much violence
as they disappeared in the rapids above. These would often rise when
least expected, breaking under the boats, the swift upshoot of water
giving them such a rap that we sometimes thought we had struck a
rock. If one happened to be in the centre of a boil when it broke,
it would send them sailing down the stream many times faster than
the regular current was travelling, rowing the boat having about as
little effect on determining its course as if it was loaded on a
flat-car. The other boat, at times just a few feet away, might be
caught in the whirlpools that formed at the edge of the fountains,
often opening up suddenly under one side of the boat, causing it to
dip until the water poured over the edge, holding it to that one spot
in spite of every effort to row away.
[Illustration: _Copyright by Kolb Bros._
WALLS OF MARBLE CANYON.]
Then we would strike peaceful water again, a mile or two perhaps,
so quiet that a thin covering of clear water over the top of the
silt-laden pool beneath, reflecting the tinted walls and the
turquoise sky beneath its limpid surface. Gems of sunlight sparkled
on its bosom and scintillated in the ripples left behind by the oars.
When seated with our backs to the strongest light, and when glancing
along the top of such a pool instead of into it, the mirror-like
surface gave way to a peculiar purplish tone which seemed to cover
the pool, so that one would forget it was roily water, and saw only
the iridescent beauty of a mountain stream.
The wonderful marble walls--better known to the miners as the blue
limestone walls--now rose from the water’s edge to a height of
eight or nine hundred feet, the surface of its light blue-gray rock
being stained to a dark red, or a light red as the case might be,
by the iron from the sandstone walls above. There were a thousand
feet of these sandstone layers, red in all its varying hues, capped
by the four-hundred foot cross-bedded sandstone wall, breaking
sheer, ranging in tone from a soft buff to a golden yellow, with a
bloom, or glow, as though illuminated from within. As we proceeded,
another layer could be seen above this, the same limestone and with
the same fossils--an examination of the rock-slides told us--as
the topmost formation at the Grand Canyon. This was not unlike the
cross-bedded sandstone in colour, but lacked its warmth and richness
of tint. A close, examination of the rocks revealed many colours,
that figured but little in the grand colour scheme of the canyon
as a whole--the detailed ornamentation of the magnificent rock
structure. A fracture of wall would show the true colour of the
rock, beneath the stain; lime crystals studded its surface, like
gems glinting in the sunlight; beautifully tinted jasper, resembling
the petrified wood found in another part of Arizona, was embedded
in the marble wall,--usually at the point of contact with another
formation,--polished by the sands of the turbid river.
All this told us that we were coming into our own. Four of the seven
notable divisions of rock strata found in the Grand Canyon were
now represented in Marble Canyon, and soon the green shale, which
underlies the blue limestone, began to crop out by the river as the
walls grew higher and the stream cut deeper.
One turn of the canyon revealed a break where Stanton hid his
provisions in a cave--after a second fatality in which two more of
this ill-fated expedition lost their lives--and climbed out on top.
Afterwards he re-outfitted with heavier boats and tackled the stream
again.
Just below this break the scene changed as we made a sharp turn to
the left. Vasey’s Paradise--named by Major Powell after Dr. Geo. W.
Vasey, botanist of the United States Department of Agriculture--was
disclosed to view. Beautiful streams gushed from rounded holes,
fifty yards above the river. The rock walls reminded one of an
ivy-covered castle of old England, guarded by a moat uncrossed by
any drawbridge. It was trellised with vines, maidenhair ferns, and
water-moss making a vivid green background for the golden yellow and
burnished copper leaves which still clung to some small cottonwood
trees--the only trees we had seen in Marble Canyon.
In our haste to push on, we left the brass motion-picture tripod head
on an island, from which we pictured this lovely spot. A rapid was
put behind us before we noticed our loss, and there was no going back
then.
Another turn revealed a Gothic arch, or grotto, carved at the bend of
the wall by the high water, with an overhang of more than a hundred
feet, and a height nearly as great, for the flood waters ran above
the hundred-foot stage in this narrow walled section. Then came a
gloomy, prison-like formation, with a “Bridge of Sighs” two hundred
feet above a gulch, connecting the dungeon to the perpendicular wall
beyond; and with a hundred cave-like openings in its sheer sides like
small windows, admitting a little daylight into its dark interior.
The sullen boom of a rapid around the turn sounded like the march of
an army coming up the gorge, so we climbed back into our boats after
a vain attempt to climb up to some of the caves, and advanced to
meet our foe. This rapid--the tenth for the day--while it was clear
of rocks, had an abrupt drop, with powerful waves which did all
sorts of things to us and to our boats; breaking a rowlock and the
four pieces of line which held it, and flooding us both with a ton
of water. We went into camp a short distance below this, in a narrow
box canyon running back a hundred yards from the river, a gloomy,
cathedral-like interior, with sheer walls rising several hundred feet
on three sides of us, and with the top of the south wall 2500 feet
above us in plain sight of our camp, the one camp in Marble Canyon
where our sleep was undisturbed by the roar of a rapid. But instead
of the roar of a rapid, a howling wind swept down from the Painted
Desert above, piling the mingled desert sands and river sands about
our beds, scattering our camp material over the bottom of the narrow
gorge.
Soon after this camp--the fourth and the last in Marble Canyon--was
left behind us, the walls began to widen out, especially on the
north-northwest, and by noon we had passed from the narrow, direct
canyon, into one with slopes and plateaus breaking the sheer walls,
the wall on the left or southeast side being much the lower of the
two, and more nearly perpendicular, rising to a height of 3200
feet, while the northwest side lifted up to the Kaibab Plateau, one
point--miles back from the river--rising 6000 feet above us.
[Illustration: _Copyright by Kolb Bros._
APPROACHING THE GRAND CANYON. NOTE BOAT.]
We halted at noon beside the Nancoweep Valley, a wide tributary
heading many miles back in the plateau on the right, with a
ramified series of canyons running into it, and with great expanses
of sage-covered flats between. Deer tracks were found on these flats,
deer which came down from the forest of the Buckskin Mountains.
This was the point selected by Major Powell for the construction of
a trail when he returned from his voyage of exploration to study
the geology of this section. The trail, although neglected for many
years, is still used by prospectors from Kanab, Utah, who make a
yearly trip into the canyons to do some work on a mineral ledge a few
miles below here.
What a glorious, exhilarating run we had that day! From here to the
end of Marble Canyon the rapids were almost continuous, with few
violent drops and seldom broken by the usual quiet pools. It was the
finest kind of water for fast travelling, and we made the most of it.
The only previous run we had made that could in any way compare with
it was in Whirlpool and Split Mountain canyons, when the high water
was on. As we travelled, occasional glimpses were had of familiar
places on Greenland Point--that thirty-mile peninsula of the Kaibab
Plateau extending between Marble Canyon and the Grand Canyon--where
we had gone deer-hunting, or on photographic expeditions with Rust.
Another valley from the right was passed, then a peak rose before us
close to the river, with its flat top rising to a height equal to
the south wall. This was Chuar Butte. Once more we were in a narrow
canyon, narrowed by this peak, but a canyon just the same. Soon we
were below a wall we once had photographed from the mouth of the
Little Colorado; then the stream itself came in view and we were soon
anchored beside it. This was the beginning of the Grand Canyon.